Related papers: The Evolution of Overconfidence
Trust plays an essential role in the development of human society. According to the standard trust game, an investor decides whether to keep or transfer a certain portion of initial stake to a trustee. In the latter case, the stake is…
Evolution depends on the fitness of organisms, the expected rate of reproducing. Directly getting offspring is the most basic form of fitness, but fitness can also be increased indirectly by helping genetically related individuals (such as…
The contradiction between physical and economical sciences concerning the growth of the production/consumption mechanism is analyzed. It is then shown that if one wishes to keep the security level stable or to enhance it in a growing…
Reproducibility, the ability to recompute results, and replicability, the chances other experimenters will achieve a consistent result, are two foundational characteristics of successful scientific research. Consistent findings from…
Modern machine learning models with high accuracy are often miscalibrated -- the predicted top probability does not reflect the actual accuracy, and tends to be over-confident. It is commonly believed that such over-confidence is mainly due…
Cooperators forgo their interest to benefit others. Thus cooperation should not be favored by natural selection. It challenges the evolutionists, since cooperation is widespread. As one of the resolutions, information spreading has been…
The growth rate of organisms depends both on external conditions and on internal states, such as the expression levels of various genes. We show that to achieve a criterion mean growth rate over an ensemble of conditions, the internal…
Many published research results are false, and controversy continues over the roles of replication and publication policy in improving the reliability of research. Addressing these problems is frustrated by the lack of a formal framework…
Population expansions trigger many biomedical and ecological transitions, from tumor growth to invasions of non-native species. Although population spreading often selects for more invasive phenotypes, we show that this outcome is far from…
Behavioral experiments on the trust game have shown that trust and trustworthiness are universal among human beings, contradicting the prediction by assuming \emph{Homo economicus} in orthodox Economics. This means some mechanism must be at…
A general theory of innovation and progress in human society is outlined, based on the combat between two opposite forces (conservatism/inertia and speculative herding "bubble" behavior). We contend that human affairs are characterized by…
Belief dynamics are fundamental to human behavior and social coordination. Individuals rely on accurate beliefs to make decisions, and shared beliefs form the basis of successful cooperation. Traditional studies often examined beliefs in…
The idea that there are any large-scale trends in the evolution of biological organisms is highly controversial. It is commonly believed, for example, that there is a large-scale trend in evolution towards increasing complexity, but…
Prior work has identified a resilient phenomenon that threatens the performance of human-AI decision-making teams: overreliance, when people agree with an AI, even when it is incorrect. Surprisingly, overreliance does not reduce when the AI…
Cooperation plays a fundamental role in societal and biological domains, and the population structure profoundly shapes the dynamics of evolution. Practically, individuals behave either altruistically or egoistically in multiple groups,…
We introduce and study an evolutionary complementarity game where in each round a player of population 1 is paired with a member of population 2. The game is symmetric, and each player tries to obtain an advantageous deal, but when one of…
Can AI agents predict whether they will succeed at a task? We study agentic uncertainty by eliciting success probability estimates before, during, and after task execution. All results exhibit agentic overconfidence: some agents that…
More often than not, bad decisions are bad regardless of where and when they are made. Information sharing might thus be utilized to mitigate them. Here we show that sharing the information about strategy choice between players residing on…
Social learning, copying other's behavior without actual experience, offers a cost-effective means of knowledge acquisition. However, it raises the fundamental question of which individuals have reliable information: successful individuals…
We characterize a notion of confidence that arises in learning or updating beliefs: the amount of trust one has in incoming information and its impact on the belief state. This learner's confidence can be used alongside (and is easily…